


Games We Didn't Play

by Vera (Vera_DragonMuse)



Series: Durin's Auto Body [4]
Category: The Hobbit (Jackson Movies), The Hobbit - All Media Types
Genre: F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-13
Updated: 2014-01-13
Packaged: 2018-01-08 16:04:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,420
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1134706
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vera_DragonMuse/pseuds/Vera
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It takes Legolas four years to go back to the start.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Games We Didn't Play

Legolas' first time was miserable. In a cold dorm room, halfway through a tipsy night with a guy who looked good, but turned out to be mechanical and disinterested. It was what Legolas had wanted. Something swift and unsentimental. He thought he'd feel better afterwards, relieved of the burden that he'd carried pointlessly for too long.

Instead there was a void, thirsty and aching, cracked wide open in his chest.

It had been two years since he'd called Tauriel, but his fingers still knew the number. She was all he wanted just then with a fierceness that he couldn't explain.

"Hello?" She answered with a yawn, just woken and he could imagine her in oversized t-shirt and boxers and missed her so much it ached.

"Hi," he choked. "It's me."

There was a pregnant pause and then she sighed, "You utter bastard."

"Speaking," he closed his eyes and folded himself small.

"What happened?"

He told her, downplaying the details. How he ached inside and out, but she probably heard it anyway.

"I shouldn't have called,” he said into her silence.

"Damn right. Should've called the first day you got there and once a week like I was your damn mother," she hissed. "Don't move."

He had gone to college three states away, but Tauriel was made of miracles. She was there before the sunset, surveying his room with a sad tilt to her mouth. She made him tea and fixed his hair like they were still children, parenting each other the best they knew how.

"I was wrong," he confessed. “I’m sorry.”

"An apology. You've grown," but her hold on his hair softened and turned into something like a caress.

"Where's your accessory?" He mumbled.

"Working. Also, he still hates you for breaking his best friend's heart."

"He must've loved you coming to see me.”

"No," she sounded fond. "He's not a petty brat like you. Kissed me goodbye and changed my oil before I went."

They watched a Star Wars marathon late into the night.

"I don't know what I'm doing," he stared at the ceiling while Han shot first.

"No one does," she sighed.

"Shouldn't you be lecturing on breaking free of my father's control and returning to the arm's of my high school sweetheart like you?"

"Historically, you don't follow advice. You've always had to do things the hardest way."

He thought about that long after she'd left in a cloud of orange blossom and one of his college sweatshirts. He thought about it as he sat through a pointless lecture and drank with a crowd of people that all knew his name and not much more about him.  

It was all shit. He stared at these people, these fragile friendships that splintered away under the slightest stress. When they were small, he had once cut off his own hair when some bully smeared gum in Tauriel’s long locks, so the butchery looked like fashion instead. There wasn’t one college friend that he’d get up early for, let alone cut his hair.

“Another?” A soused slender man offered him a blue slushie that smelled like alcohol fumes.

“No,” Legolas set aside his empty cup. “I’d rather set myself on fire then drink that.”

“You’ve had two already!” Someone else hollered out.  

“And that was two, too many.”

It had been too long since he swept from a room. It wasn’t his finest exit, but it felt a little like reclaiming himself. Two weeks later, he woke with a frighteningly familiar face looming over his.

“Hello, pretty boy.”

“Am I dead? Am I in hell?” He blinked rapidly.

“Your callouses are gone,” Kili picked up one of Legolas’ hands with wrinkled nose. “You haven’t picked up a bow since you got here, I’d guess.”

“I haven’t taken any strong drugs. Was I roofied?”

“Your muscles look lax. You’re probably not going to survive this. If I didn’t want to punch you so much, I’d actually feel a little bad for you.”

“You’re an embodiment of all my bad karma.? That’s it, right? Atonement for my sins?”

“Guess what!” Tauriel burst into his peripheral vision. “There’s an archery competition here tomorrow. You need to practice.”

“Why?” He stared at her.  

“Archery is the only thing that makes you bearable to be around,” Kili offered, shifting so his knee was in Legolas’ solar plexus.

“Something like that,” Tauriel kissed Kili on cheek.

“I hate you both,” Legolas declared and kept declaring as Tauriel bullied him into workout clothes and into her convertible.

“It’s mutual, you ass,” Kili was still grinning and it took Legolas a good twenty minutes to realize it had nothing to do with his joy at torturing Legolas.

“Oh, gross. Please tell me you got a hotel room,” he groaned.

“Why would we do that?” Kili chirped. “Drove through the night. Did borrow your couch for a short nap this morning. Surprisingly spacious.”

“My couch,” he gagged. “Remind me to burn it.”

“You’ve done worse on it,” Tauriel said with more surety than she had a right too.

Though he bitched the entire way there, Legolas lost all his words when they put his bow back in his hands.

“I left this in my room at home.”

“I know,” Tauriel patted his cheek. “I distracted your father while Kili stole it.”

“Oh,” he bit his lip.

“Go on,” she shoved at him. “You need a lot of practice.”

His fingers bled. There was always another arrow when he reached. They stood on either side of him, joking around him and showing off tricks, the most unnecessary flirtation of all time.

It was glorious.

“Thank you,” he hugged Tauriel hard enough that her ribs creaked, turned around and found Kili arms wide open and a salacious grin. Legolas patted him on the head. “You are not an evil troll.”

“Careful, ice queen. You’re dripping on the carpet,” Kili laughed.

There actually was a competition the next day. Legolas didn’t fool himself into thinking he was up for it, but he was startlingly content sitting in the stands, eating stale popcorn and cheering. He took them both out to dinner somewhere ridiculously expensive and mostly hid his amusement as Kili picked the food into suspicious mush. They talked about people from back home and Legolas swallowed down a homesickness he hadn’t known had been swelling in him. He thought he’d be fabulously grateful to see the back of those shabby streets and the cluster of people that knew him too well.

“You should probably ask what you want to ask,” Kili said over a dessert that was more spun sugar than cake.

“Don’t think I’ve got the right to,” he admitted, dropping his gaze down to his plate.

“Well, that’s something,” Kili cleared his throat. “Damn. I wanted to string him on more, but he looks pathetic.”

“It’s the eyes,” Tauriel agreed. “Gimli is fine.”

Legolas had spent the bulk of the last two years not thinking about Gimli. It had taken a great deal of energy that involved a lot of kissing other people, avoiding Facebook and generally failing at it. Even the ill-fated first time had been an erasure. When they were dating, Legolas had always assumed they’d get around to it, but then summer had arrived with it’s vicious promise of another life and he’d walked away from the possibility. Now so many of his firsts belonged to strangers.

The thing was, Legolas wasn’t Tauriel. He didn’t want to find his soulmate sitting beside him in a high school cafeteria and never leave town. Legolas wanted to figure himself out. Untangle the knot of fear and anxiety that threatened to choke him when he lived under his father’s roof. He wanted to burn his past to the ground and then build his future out of whole cloth.

Gimli wasn’t even particularly anything. Not very clever or very beautiful or very kind. He was grumpy and short and ferocious about nothing at all. Every day they were together, they’d fought about something and Gimli ended each argument with a ‘ech! You!’ like that was actually the last word on anything.  

No one Legolas knew was anything like Gimli and that suited him just fine.

“Just fine?” He asked around the lump in his throat.

“He’s in college too,” Kili put in. “Getting his degree in computer science. Speaks a lot of nonsense that  means absolutely nothing to me, but he seems thrilled.”

“There’s a boy,” Tauriel said in the same tone people reserved for ‘it’s terminal’.

“Jason,” Kili wrinkled his nose in distaste and Legolas could have kissed him for that. “He’s not serious.”

“He might be,” Tauriel pursed her lips. “He’s been around for a few months.”  

“Oh,” Legolas said helplessly.

“The thing is,” Kili broke a delicate strand of hard sugar in three, “you’re both mad bastards and he sometimes still comes over to stare at our fridge and sigh weirdly and tries to get me to play on the PSBox or whatever, then purposely doesn’t talk about you for hours. So if you could get on with figuring things out, I’d appreciate it.”

“Take your time,” Tauriel kicked Kili under the table.

“What if I...don’t?”

“Then you don’t,” she shrugged and Kili chewed his broken sugar and shrugged too.

It was the most liberating thing anyone had ever said to him.

He didn’t change overnight. He wasn’t sure he really did change. It was more like he cleared away the cobwebs of confusion and extraneous information. His studies shifted substantially, the planned Business Major tanking under the weight of sociology, psychology, philosophy and every other ology that didn’t have too much math.  

“What are you doing?” His father demanded watery over the phone.

“I have no idea,” he grinned at his laptop. “Also, I applied for financial aid.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m gay. Also, I hate the family business. And most of the time, I hate you too.”

He’d weep about it years later, but in the beginning it just felt freeing how his father had hung up and cut away the netting of financial security that Legolas had depended on for the first twenty years of his life. The grief of that snuck up on him. In those first months, all he felt was a weird elation.

The reality was stark enough, of course. For the first time in his life, Legolas worked. He got a job in the library, shelving and folding and stapling. Between his new classes that came with more reading and the hours he put in, he was tired more often than not.  He actually went out and came back early because sleep sounded better than another drink.

It was phenomenal. His snark was appreciated by the other library pages and his new classes came with different, interesting classmates. He made better friends, but no one as good as Tauriel, who he did call once a week. This time around, he made a point to actually listen to her and it made things better. She told him things, real things, instead of treating him like an annoying younger brother.

“I’m scared,” she confessed to him once late at night, her voice a tether in the darkness.

“Of what?”

“Of doing all this too early, too soon.”

“Too soon for who?”

“For me. For him. It all seems too easy and what if we grow up more and we hate each other? What if we just...fall out of love?”

He threw an arm over his eyes and chewed it over for longer than she’d probably like, but she didn’t rush him. Just let the silence spread between them.

“I think that if you love him right now that’s what matters,” he decided. “Maybe five years from now you’ll set fire to his car and take half of everything he owns, but you can’t know that. No one can. Grab the good now.”

“It’s always arson with you in the end,” she laughed. “You’re probably right.”

“I’m always right.”

He went to the wedding because she refused to hear of having a Maid of Honor. It was just the two of them in a cramped bathroom off the side of a tiny church filled with Kili’s family and their friends.

“I once thought it would be like this forever,” she told him as she adjusted her dress. “You and me.”

“I hope you imagined more dignified surroundings,” he looked at her over the mirror, their faces so alike one beside the other.

“I imagined it as very lonely, actually.”

“You wound me,” he rested her chin on her bared shoulder. “I’m excellent company.”

“Yes,” she put her arm around his back. “But you need more than two people to make a life, don’t you?”

It was raucous outside with too many loud voices and short bodies.  

“You do,” he agreed and kissed her cheek.

There was no one else to give her away, so he walked her down the aisle. He was so focused on not stepping on her dress that he was almost able to block out what he’d have to face when he let her go.

Across the aisle, Gimli stood stiff in a rented tuxedo. He had filled out a little, shoulders that had once fit neatly in Legolas’ palm were broad now and his arms looked strong.  They went the entire ceremony without making eye contact.

“We’re meant to take photos altogether,” Fili appeared at Legolas’ elbow, eyes a little red rimmed. “Best Man and...other Best Man. Rest of the bridal party too.”

It’d be funny later, how they had photos of that wedding with the two of them posed right beside each other. At the time, there’d been nothing funny about it. Legolas was close enough to touch, but too far away to speak. Gimli held himself in that tense ready way that he’d always used to cover his hurts.

The reception was loud and long, but Legolas knew parties. He could dance with Tauriel and the bridesmaids, make clever conversation and melt away just after dessert without anyone being the wiser.

He went back to college. Back to work and study.

Graduation day arrived in a sneak attack and he accepted his diploma alone. Tauriel had to work and it was hardly as if his father was coming. So he loaded up four years of his life into his car by himself and drove back to the crappy town he’d sworn to leave behind. There was a job there, a solid, dependable and utterly dull job.

He crossed the townlines, saw the cafe and the movie theater. The streets were in worse condition then he remembered, rattling his teeth in his head. There were apartments he should be looking at, work clothes to buy and people he should call.

Instead, he drove to the only destination that called to him. The house looked just the same, tidy and cramped. There was no one home, but he didn’t mind waiting. He sat down on the porch steps amid the clutter of rocking chairs and garden decorations.

He watched Gimli come down the street an hour later. It was an easy walk, a long stride. There was a brown leather jacket that Legolas didn’t recognize and a green sweatshirt beneath that he did. It was the one Tauriel had stolen from Legolas’ dorm room. He wondered how that conversation had gone down.

Gimli stopped at the mailbox, checked it and then started down the walk. He was halfway to Legolas before he noticed him there.

“Hi,” Legolas didn’t smile or get up. Gimli stood stockstill. “You’re an asshole.”

“I’m an asshole?” Anger flared up so quickly it might as well have been a greasefire. “You fucking piece of-”

“You let me go,” Legolas folded his arms tight to himself. “I gave you that ridiculous speech and you never said a word. You let me walk out of your life and never even tried to chase after me.”

“You told me that you weren’t going to be the pathetic jerk who spent his life with high school sweetheart,” Gimli dropped the mail. “You said it was a waste of our potential.”

“I was probably right,” Legolas shrugged. “You wouldn’t’ve gone to college if I stuck around. You had to prove me wrong, so you did.”

“Excuse me, Mr. High and Fucking Mighty! I didn’t need you to motivate me to do shit. Once you left, all that was different was that I felt-” Gimli stopped dead. “Wait. Did you just drive all this way to pick a fight with me?”

“No,” Legolas stared at him. “I came all this way to tell you that we should get back together.”

“Why the fuck would I do that?”

“Because I’ve spent the last four years trying to figure everything out. Trying to find all that potential and I studied and I worked hard and I ditched my vapid friends for slightly less ridiculous people and I told my father to go fuck himself. I did all that and my conclusion was that I’m at my best when I’m with you. That I’m amazing on my own, but spectacular with you.”

“That sounds like something you practiced in the mirror,” Gimli crossed his arms over his chest. “How many times? Did you add in the soulful eyes for effect or does that kind of bullshit come natural to you now?”

“I missed you. Every day. I kept thinking it would get better. But it didn’t,” he couldn’t stop staring. Gimli looked so much like the boy he’d left on these very steps and yet like someone totally other. A grown man, slower to smile and somber around the eyes.

“You could’ve come back!” Gimil gritted out.  “Any time, you could’ve. I would’ve...punched you probably, but I would have taken you back.”

“Past tense?”

“It’s been four years, you complete prick!” Gimli shouted. “Four years! Everything changed! You can’t just come back here and give me some pretty speech and then what?”

“Well, there’s this house-”

“No! No! Not this time, Greenleaf,” Gimli stormed past him, hands clenched in anger. “You can rot for all I care. Four years without a goddamn word, you can die alone in your own vomit for all I care.”

The door slammed shut. Legolas leaned against a post and waited. The sky purpled and darkened. The fireflies came out. When they’d first started up with each other, they would sneak a last kiss here at the end of the night. It was a greedy sort of kiss, a helpless teenage lusty thing to do when it wasn’t really safe. Legolas hadn’t kissed anyone like that in four years.

The hum of cicadas filled the silence and Legolas watched the fireflies flicker until the porch door squeaked open. Gimli sat down heavily beside him.

“I’ve got a job at a server farm a few towns over,” he said and he sounded rough. Legolas didn’t move. Didn’t dare. “You?”

“Clerking for an accounting firm.”

“Probably own the place in two years.”

“Don’t want to, particularly.”

“No?” Gimli coughed.

“No. Maybe eventually. I think I just want to hang out for awhile.”

“I dated this guy,” Gimli sighed. “For a year. He was good. Solid. Not dramatic. Or funny. Good looking though.”

“There were people,” Legolas searched the sky for the North star. “None of them stuck. I don’t blame them. I was awful.”

“You were always awful. You hate children and you root for predators during nature documentaries.”

“Lions have to live too. Natural selection is a hard reality when you don’t have thumbs.”

“You’re terrible. You’ve always been terrible and you will continue to be terrible forever.”

“But you...you liked that I was terrible,” Legolas glanced at him, at the fine sharp features of Gimli’s profile. “Didn’t you?”

“I have no idea how to deal with you when you’re being all...insecure and human,” Gimli grimaced. “It’s weird.”

“I’ve always been insecure,” Legolas laughed weakly. “Who acts like that when they’re confident?”

“Dunno. Always seemed like you were together. Cool.”

“We once spent an entire weekend arguing about Aquaman’s sexuality and if he could reproduce asexually. There were diagrams.”

“Yes, well. I made you less cool and that’s a fact.”

“Not true,” Legolas propped his chin on his hands. “I used to worry that you’d dump me when you figured out that I wasn’t everything you thought I was. I mean, you treated me like I was... supernatural or something.”

“You were. To me. I was pretty much waiting for you to leave. Guess that’s why I didn’t follow after. Didn’t seem a point to fighting the inevitable.”

“It’s been a long four years.”

“Aye,” Gimli shifted, their knees tapping briefly together.

“You should go out with me.”

“Why? Because you’ve changed?”  

“Nah,” Legolas leaned back, elbows on the step above him. “Because I’m basically the same, but I haven’t played Call of Duty in four years. You can probably beat me. Small window of opportunity though because if you don’t go out with me, I’ll be forced to spend my freetime getting to know my consoles again. Three or four weeks and I’ll be mowing you down.”

“You did hear the part where I majored in Computer Science, right?” Gimli snorted. “I’ve spent the last four years honing my skills.”

“Prove it.”

The challenge apparently rankled and that was how Legolas got back into the house. The couch hadn’t changed, the one spring digging into the same spot his thigh where he’d once carried a near permanent bruise from it. The television was different though, bigger and shiner which Legolas saw Gimli’s hand in.

They played until the sun rose again.

“This doesn’t mean you’ve won the war,” Gimli grumbled as an alarm went off somewhere deep in the house.

“I’ll take a battle to start. Dinner on Friday?”

Legolas stayed in a hotel for the first two months he was back. It was expensive, but he was a man of vision. That vision wasn’t shared by anyone else with a lick of sense, but fuck them. At the beginning of the third month, Legolas went for a walk with Gimli and they walked by the sickly yellow victorian with the ‘For Rent’ sign waving in the breeze.

“Nice place,” he said casually.

“Like hell,” Gimli stopped and surveyed it. “This is the one you meant that first day back.”

“Was it?” Legolas frowned. “Maybe. Just a house.”

“You’ve already calculated out the rent. And you’ve got three different plans on how to trick me into moving in with you.”

“Slander.”

“Truth,” Gimli stared at the house. “Why this one?”

“It’s like us.”

“Pathetic and crumbling?”

“I was going to say that it just needs a little love, but you do have some serious construction problems on the left side of your face now that you mention it.”

“At least my foundations are sound unlike some morally bankrupt people I know,” Gimli frowned. “Can we even swing it?”

“Ori wants to move out of his brother’s house. Three of us together could make it work. And it’s a little less like...you know.”

“Like we’re settling down,” Gimli flickered a glance at him. “Committing.”

A car rumbled by behind them.

“It is like that though,” Legolas put his hand on Gimli’s shoulder. It was as broad as it looked, hard under his fingers.

They hadn’t so much as kissed since Legolas came back. He hadn’t tried and it had felt right not to. Gimli reached up, tugged Legolas down a few critical inches and stared at him.

“If we do this, can we agree that it’s my turn to leave you next time?”

“Yes,” Legolas decided. “Definitely your turn. You can even throw my clothes out the window and set my car on fire.”

“It’s always arson with you,” Gimli laughed and kissed him.

It wasn’t what Legolas remembered. It was better somehow, almost transcendent. Though that might have been the lack of blood in his brain thanks to his nearly instantaneous erection.

“It’s a crime that we’ve never had sex,” he declared as soon as Gimli pulled away.

“Depends on how you define-”

“I mean you fucking me,” Legolas said impatiently. “That’s something we should do. Immediately if not sooner.”

“Bit of horse before the cart there.”

“We’ve been together two years and two months altogether. That seems timely.”

“Four years in the middle there that you’re missing.”

“Already forgotten,” Legolas shrugged. “A blip on the radar. We’re going to be together for the next sixty. So that’s barely two percent.”

“Did they bother to teach you math at that fancy school?” Gimli wrapped his hand around Legolas’ neck and kissed him again. “Good thing you’re pretty.”

Because Gimli was Satan, he made Legolas wait until they were moved into the house. Because Tauriel was his lead demon with her evil troll apprentice, she and Kili stayed long past their welcome on the first night after helping with a dizzying amount of boxes. They stayed so long that poor Ori fell asleep on the rug and they just left him there with a dusty afghan thrown over him.

“Oh, look at the time!” Tauriel said when it was too late to be borne. She was smiling with so many teeth that a shark would be jealous. “Home for us, my love.”

“Already?” Kili matched her smile tooth for tooth and Legolas had never hated anyone more in life. “If you insist.”

“Ugh,” Gimli threw himself into bed. “Sleep.”

“This is a crime against nature,” Legolas complained, then octopused over Gimli in case he got cold feet in the middle of the night.

They did have sex the next morning though. As it turned out, it wasn’t worth the wait.

“Like hell!” Gimli’s eyes went wide when Legolas mentioned that in the afterglow. “Why would-”

“Nothing was worth the wait,” Legolas interrupted him. “I’m sorry. That I made it happen.”

“Oh,” Gimli’s anger left him all at once, making him pliable in Legolas’ arms again. “Well. You were right, I suppose. We needed to figure ourselves out. Or something.”

“I’m always right,” Legolas yawned. “Law of nature.”

“You’re full of shit is what you always are,” but Gimli yawned too and they dozed together in the sun.

It wasn’t Legolas first time. Not even close, but he scrubbed clean from his memory every time before it. None of that had mattered the way this mattered. This was the first time that counted.


End file.
